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The City in Literature
The City in Literature
The City in Literature
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methods with which to describe the metropolitan landscape. Various stages of urban development thus generated new ways of conceptualizing the city. As Lehan explains, Comic and romantic realism give us insights into
the commercial city; naturalism and modernism into the
industrial city; and postmodernism into the postindustrial city. e city and the literary text have had inseparable histories (p. 289). With continued urban expansion,
modernist conceptions of the city focused on the complexity of the metropolis as embodied by the image of the
crowd. e crowd, Lehan explains, became a metonym
for the city in modernist discourse (p. 71). Rather than a
gathering of individuals, modernists perceived the crowd
as a potentially dangerous mob, whose alienated members had lost their individuality. With the increasing diversity of the crowd, cities seemed to pose a challenge
not only to order, but also to the organic community.
Looking backwards to an idealized past of cultural homogeneity, poets like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot warned that
a mechanized metropolis, driven by individualistic materialistic desires and the power of money, would lead toward cultural entropy and a desolate urban wasteland.
Authors of the modern metropolis depicted individuals
as either alienated and alone amid the decadent crowd
or searching for identity in a centralized power and embracing a totalitarian state. Here, Lehan might have discussed more concretely the socioeconomic backgrounds
of authors like Pound and Eliot, explicitly identifying the
sources of their anxieties (and thus the motivations for
their narrative methods) in the historical conditions of
the metropolis.
Acknowledging the signicance of national context
in these literary texts, Lehan describes how responses to
the modern city varied across space. While themes of
order and chaos continued across the Atlantic, Lehan argues, dierences in the historical contexts of the Old and
New Worlds shaped the ways in which the city was conceptualized; while feudalism, imperialism, and totalitarianism informed European urban literature, American authors, artists, and architects reacted to and in turn shaped
images of the frontier (p. 167). Americans fascination
with their nations transition from rural to urban and
with the perceived democracy of the frontier informed
much of their literature. For instance, in America, fears
of cultural degradation and community decay appeared
less in espousals of dictatorial nationalism and more often in the Jeersonian ideals of republicanism and the
myth of the yeoman farmer.
e term around which Lehan structures much of
his analysis of American literaturefrontiercarries a
great deal of historiographical baggage as the continu-
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ban images.
When seeking to understand a particular metropolis
with its agglomeration of residents, physical structures,
and functions, we oen grasp for central themes or images. Authors too shape their conceptualization of the
city by reducing a single place to a set of scenes and stories. Many scholars have studied these complex images
in order to examine our ambivalent aitudes toward the
metropolis. Lehan ventures further, however, demonstrating how we can gain additional insights into the history of a city by examining the narrative methods of its
chroniclers. Expanding his focus only would add to this
method of analysis and to its fascinating conclusions.
Notes
[1]. omas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas
and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975); Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in American
and European ought, 1820-1940 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985); Adrienne Siegel, e Image of
the American City in Popular Literature, 1820-1870 (Port
Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1981); Dana Brand, e
Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American
Literature_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991).
Although the task would require the further expansion of e City in Literatures already broad focus, an
analysis of the rich diversity of literary voices and styles
within a single era could only add to Lehans argument of
the inuence of city form in shaping literary form. Other
historians and literary scholars, including omas Bender, Andrew Lees, Adrienne Siegel, and Dana Brand have
linked class, race, ethnicity, gender, and occupation with
aitudes towards cities, asserting that the social position
of authors and artists informed their conceptualization
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of the city.[1] Lehan leaves relatively unanswered ques- work may be copied for non-prot educational use if
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same moment in history saw and described dierent ur- permission, please contact H-Net@h-net.msu.edu.
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Citation: Sarah S. Marcus. Review of Lehan, Richard, e City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History.
H-Urban, H-Net Reviews. October, 1998.
URL: hp://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=2384
Copyright 1998 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for
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